Mark Norell Quotations

We always collect more than we can study.

I don't think it would have helped in a fight very much. It's very thin and fragile.

There are still a lot of big questions about what they would have eaten.

There is no reason to CAT scan this specimen, because clearly it's not pieced together,

Discoveries in the past 10 or 15 years have been incorporated into popular outlets. Kids watch these programs, so they do have a more up-to-date perspective than adults.

Dromaeosaurs are really interesting because they are so close to birds in evolution, having feathers and other, similar attributes.

Feathers are really just difficult things to preserve.

It would not have been used for fighting - it would have been paper-thin. That's still a long way ahead.

People care about tyrannosaurs. People are interested in them - not just scientists - and this fossil goes a long way to understanding their early history.

A number of them don't even have names yet.

A lot of people, from seeing (the film) Jurassic Park know what an ostrich dinosaur looked like. This is a case of convergence with the ostrich dinosaur. It evolved more than once.

It was collected in this quarry that literally had hundreds of skeletons in it.

It is the third to be found, but the first one that has shown feathers identical to the ones in modern birds. They were probably present on some of those in the past, but the feathers weren't preserved well enough to be able to see the fine structure. On this latest one, feathers are found all over the fossil, and they are best preserved on the back edge of the forearms and hind limbs.

The feather structure is unmistakable. You see a central shaft, and then veins or barbs coming off the side. It is identical to a modern bird feather. It was even obvious to my 3-year-old daughter.

These fossils are things we predicted would be there but seriously in my lifetime I never thought we were going to find them.